Straight

16

“I saw the scaffolding fall on him,” he said.

He’d stunned me to silence.

“We talked in the hotel. In the lounge there. It was almost empty... then we walked down the street to where I’d left my car. We said goodbye. He crossed the road and walked on, and I watched him. I wanted him to look back and wave... but he didn’t.”

Forgiveness was one thing, I thought, but friendship had gone. What did he expect? Absolution and comfort? Perhaps Greville in time would have given those too, but I couldn’t.

Prospero Jenks with painful memory said, “Grev never knew what happened... There wasn’t any warning. Just a clanging noise and metal falling and men with it. Crashing down fast. It buried him. I couldn’t see him. I ran across the road to pull him out and there were bodies... and he... he... I thought he was dead already. His head was bleeding... there was a metal bar in his stomach and another had ripped into his leg... it was... I can’t... I try to forget but I see it all the time.”

I waited and in a while he went on.

“I didn’t move him. Couldn’t. There was so much blood... and a man lying over his legs... and another man groaning. People came running... then the police... it was just chaos...”

He stopped again, and I said, “When the police came, why didn’t you stay with Greville and help him? Why didn’t you identify him to them, even?”

His genuine sorrow was flooded with a shaft of alarm. The dismay was momentary, and he shrugged it off.

“You know how it is.” He gave me a little-boy shamefaced look, much the same as when he’d admitted to changing the stones. “Don’t get involved. I didn’t want to be dragged in... I thought he was dead.”

Somewhere along the line, I thought, he was lying to me. Not about seeing the accident: his description of Greville’s injuries had been piercingly accurate.

“Did you simply... drive off?” I asked bleakly.

“No, I couldn’t. Not for ages. The police cordoned off the street and took endless statements. Something about criminal responsibility and insurance claims. But I couldn’t help them. I didn’t see why the scaffolding fell. I felt sick because of the blood. I sat in my car till they let us drive out. They’d taken Grev off in an ambulance before that... and the bar was still sticking out of his stomach...”

The memory was powerfully reviving his nausea.

“You knew by then that he was still alive,” I said.

He was shocked. “How? How could I have known?”

“They hadn’t covered his face.”

“He was dying. Anyone could see. His head was dented... and bleeding...”

Dead men don’t bleed, I thought, but didn’t say it. Prospero Jenks already looked about to throw up, and I wondered how many times he actually had, in the past eleven days.

Instead, I said, “What did you talk about in the Orwell Hotel?”

He blinked. “You know what.”

“He accused you of changing the stones.”

“Yes.” He swallowed. “Well, I apologized. Said I was sorry. Which I was. He could see that. He said why did I do it when I was bound to be found out, but when I did it, it was an impulse, and I didn’t think I’d be found out, like I told you.”

“What did he say?”

“He shook his head as if I were a baby. He was sad more than angry. I said I would give his diamonds back, of course, and I begged him to forgive me.”

“Which he did?”

“Yes, I told you. I asked if we could go on trading together. I mean, no one was as good as Grev at finding marvelous stones, and he always loved the things I made. It was good for both of us. I wanted to go back to that.”

Going back was one of life’s impossibilities, I thought. Nothing was ever the same.

“Did Greville agree?” I asked.

“Yes. He said he had the diamonds with him but he had arrangements to make. He didn’t say what. He said he would come here to the shop at the beginning of the week and I would give him his five stones and pay for the teardrops and stars. He wanted cash for them, and he was giving me a day or two to find the money.”

“He didn’t usually want cash for things, did he? You sent a check for the spinel and rock crystal.”

“Yes, well...” Again the quick look of shame. “He said cash in future, as he couldn’t trust time. But you didn’t know that.”

Greville certainly hadn’t trusted me, and it sounded as if he’d said he had the diamonds with him when he knew they were at that moment on a boat crossing the North Sea. Had he said that, I wondered? Perhaps Prospero Jenks had misheard or misunderstood, but he’d definitely believed Greville had had the diamonds with him.

“If I give you those diamonds now, then that will be the end of it?” he said. “I mean, as Grev had forgiven me, you won’t go back on that and make a fuss, will you? Not the police... Grev wouldn’t have wanted that, you know he wouldn’t.”

I didn’t answer. Greville would have to have balanced his betrayed old friendship against his respect for the law, and I supposed he wouldn’t have had Prospero prosecuted, not for a first offense, admitted and regretted.

Prospero Jenks gave my silence a hopeful look, rose from his stool and crossed to the ranks of little drawers. He pulled one open, took out several apparently unimportant packets and felt deep inside with a searching hand. He brought out a twist of white gauze fastened with a band of sticky tape and held it out to me.

“Five diamonds,” he said. “Yours.”

I took the unimpressive little parcel, which most resembled the muslin bag of herbs cooks put in stews, and weighed it in my hand. I certainly couldn’t myself tell CZ from C and he could see the doubt in my face.

“Have them appraised,” he said with unjustified bitterness, and I said we would weigh them right there and then and he would write out the weight and sign it.

“Grev didn’t...”

“More fool he. He should have done. But he trusted you. I don’t.”

“Come on, Derek.” He was cajoling: but I was not Greville.

“No. Weigh them,” I said.

With a sigh and an exaggerated shrug he cut open the little bag when I handed it back to him, and on small fine scales weighed the contents.

It was the first time I’d actually seen what I’d been searching for, and they were unimposing, to say the least. Five dull-looking grayish pieces of crystal the size of large misshapen peas without a hint of the fire waiting within. I watched the weighing carefully and took them myself off the scales, wrapping them in a fresh square of gauze which Prospero handed me and fastening them safely with sticky tape.

“Satisfied?” he said with a touch of sarcasm, watching me stow the bouquet garni in my trousers pocket.

“No. Not really.”

“They’re the genuine article,” he protested. He signed the paper on which he’d written their combined weight, and gave it to me. “I wouldn’t make that mistake again.” He studied me. “You’re much harder than Grev.”

“I’ve reason to be.”

“What reason?”

“Several attempts at theft. Sundry assaults.”

His mouth opened.

“Who else?” I said.

“But I’ve never... I didn’t...” He wanted me to believe him. He leaned forward with earnestness. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I sighed slightly. “Greville hid the letters and invoices dealing with the diamonds because he distrusted someone in his office. Someone that he guessed was running to you with little snippets of information. Someone who would spy for you.”

“Nonsense.” His mouth seemed dry, however.

I pulled out of a pocket the microcassette recorder and laid it on his workbench.

“This is a voice activated,” I said. “Greville left it switched on one day when he went to lunch, and this is what he found on the tape when he returned.” I pressed the switch and the voice that was familiar to both of us spoke revealing forth:

Jason’s voice, full of the cocky street-smart aggression that went with the orange spiky hair, clicked off eventually into silence. Prospero Jenks worked some saliva into his mouth and carefully made sure the recorder was not still alive and listening.

“Jason wasn’t talking to me,” he said unconvincingly. “He was talking to someone else.”

“Jason was the regular messenger between you and Greville,” I said. “I sent him round here myself last week. Jason wouldn’t take much seducing to bring you information along with the merchandise. But Greville found out. It compounded his sense of betrayal. So when you and he were talking in the Orwell at Ipswich, what was his opinion of Jason?”

He made a gesture of half-suppressed fury.

“I don’t know how you know all this,” he said.

It had taken nine days and a lot of searching and a good deal of guessing at possibilities and probabilities, but the pattern was now a reliable path through at least part of the maze, and no other interpretation that I could think of explained the facts.

I said again, “What did he say about Jason?”

Prospero Jenks capitulated. “He said he’d have to leave Saxony Franklin. He said it was a condition of us ever doing business again. He said I was to tell Jason not to turn up for work on the Monday.”

“But you didn’t do that,” I said.

“Well, no.”

“Because when Greville died, you decided to try to steal not only five stones but the lot.”

The blue eyes almost smiled. “Seemed logical, didn’t it?” he said. “Grev wouldn’t know. The insurance would pay. No one would lose.”

Except the underwriters, I thought. But I said, “The diamonds weren’t insured. Are not now insured. You were stealing them directly from Greville.”

He was almost astounded, but not quite.

“Greville told you that, didn’t he?” I guessed.

Again the little-boy shame. “Well, yes, he did.”

“In the Orwell?”

“Yes.”

“Pross,” I said, “did you ever grow up?”

“You don’t know what growing up is. Growing up is being ahead of the game.”

“Stealing without being found out?”

“Of course. Everyone does it. You have to make what you can.”

“But you have this marvelous talent,” I said.

“Sure. But I make things for money. I make what people like. I take their bread, whatever they’ll pay. Sure, I get a buzz when what I’ve made is brilliant, but I wouldn’t starve in a garret for art’s sake. Stones sing to me. I give them life. Gold is my paintbrush. All that, sure. But I’ll laugh behind people’s backs. They’re gullible. The day I understood all customers are suckers is the day I grew cup.”

I said, “I’ll bet you never said all that to Greville.”

“Do me a favor. Grev was a saint, near enough. The only truly good person through and through I’ve ever known. I wish I hadn’t cheated him. I regret it something rotten.”

I listened to the sincerity in his voice and believed him, but his remorse had been barely skin deep, and nowhere had it altered his soul.

“Jason,” I said, “knocked me down outside St. Catherine’s Hospital and stole the bag containing Greville’s clothes.”

“No.” The Jenks denial was automatic, but his eyes were full of shock.

I said, “I thought at the time it was an ordinary mugging. The attacker was quick and strong. A friend who was with me said the mugger wore jeans and a woolly hat, but neither of us saw his face. I didn’t bother to report it to the police because there was nothing of value in the bag.”

“So how can you say it was Jason?”

I answered his question obliquely.

“When I went to Greville’s firm to tell them he was dead,” I said, “I found his office had been ransacked. As you know. The next day I discovered that Greville had bought diamonds. I began looking for them, but there was no paperwork, no address book, no desk diary, no reference to or appointments with diamond dealers. I couldn’t physically find the diamonds either. I spent three days searching in the vault, with Annette and June, her assistant, telling me that there never were any diamonds in the office, Greville was far too security conscious. You yourself told me the diamonds were intended for you, which I didn’t know until I came here. Everyone in the office knew I was looking for diamonds, and at that point Jason must have told you I was looking for them, which informed you that I didn’t know where they were.”

He watched my face with his mouth slightly open, no longer denying, showing only the stunned disbelief of the profoundly found out.

“The office staff grew to know I was a jockey,” I said, “and Jason behaved to me with an insolence I thought inappropriate, but I now think his arrogance was the result of his having had me facedown on the ground under his foot. He couldn’t crow about that, but his belief in his superiority was stamped all over him. I asked the office staff not to unsettle the customers by telling them that they were now trading with a jockey, not a gemologist, but I think it’s certain that Jason told you.”

“What makes you think that?” He didn’t say it hadn’t happened.

“You couldn’t get into Greville’s house to search it,” I said, “because it’s a fortress. You couldn’t swing any sort of wrecking ball against the windows because the grilles inside made it pointless, and anyway they’re wired on a direct alarm to the police station. The only way to get into the house is by key, and I had the keys. So you worked out how to get me there, and you set it up through the trainer I ride for, which is how I know you were aware I was a jockey. Apart from the staff, no one else who knew I was a jockey knew I was looking for diamonds, because I carefully didn’t tell them. Come to the telephone in Greville’s house for information about the diamonds, you said, and I obediently turned up, which was foolish.”

“But I never went to Greville’s house...” he said.

“No, not you, Jason. Strong and fast in the motorcycle helmet which covered his orange hair, butting me over again just like old times. I saw him vault the gate on the way out. That couldn’t have been you. He turned the house upside down but the police didn’t think he’d found what he was looking for, and I’m sure he didn’t.”

“Why not?” he asked, and then said, “That’s to say...”

“Did you mean Jason to kill me?” I asked flatly.

“No! Of course not!” The idea seemed genuinely to shock him.

“He could have done,” I said.

“I’m not a murderer!” His indignation, as far as I could tell, was true and without reservation, quite different to his reaction to my calling him a thief.

“What were you doing two days ago, on Sunday afternoon?” I said.

“What?” He was bewildered by the question but not alarmed.

“Sunday afternoon,” I said.

“What about Sunday afternoon? What are you talking about?”

I frowned. “Never mind. Go back to Saturday night. To Jason giving me a concussion with half a brick.”

The knowledge of that was plain to read. We were again on familiar territory.

“You can kill people,” I said, “hitting them with bricks.”

“But he said...” He stopped dead.

“You might as well go on,” I said reasonably, “we both know that what I’ve said is what happened.”

“Yes, but... what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’ll deny everything.”

“What did Jason say about the brick?”

He gave a hopeless little sigh. “He said he knew how to knock people out for half an hour. He’d seen it done in street riots, he said, and he’d done it himself. He said it depended on where you hit.”

“You can’t time it,” I objected.

“Well, that’s what he said.”

He hadn’t been so wrong, I supposed. I’d beaten his estimate by maybe ten minutes, not more.

“He said you’d be all right afterward,” Pross said.

“He couldn’t be sure of that.”

“But you are, aren’t you?” There seemed to be a tinge of regret that I hadn’t emerged punch-drunk and unable to hold the present conversation. Callous and irresponsible, I thought, and unforgivable, really. Greville had forgiven treachery; and which was worse?

“Jason knew which office window to break,” I said, “and he came down from the roof. The police found marks up there.” I paused. “Did he do that alone, or were you with him?”

“Do you expect me to tell you?” he said incredulously.

“Yes, I do. Why not? You know what plea bargaining is, you just tried it with five diamonds.”

He gave me a shattered look and searched his common sense; not that he had much of it, when one considered.

Eventually, without shame, he said, “We both went.”

“When?”

“That Sunday. Late afternoon. After he brought Grev’s things back from Ipswich and they were a waste of time.”

“You found out which hospital Greville was in,” I said, “and you sent Jason to steal his things because you believed they would include the diamonds which Greville had told you he had with him, is that right?”

He rather miserably nodded. “Jason phoned me from the hospital on the Saturday and said Grev wasn’t dead yet but that his brother had turned up, some frail old creature on crutches, and it was good because he’d be an easy mark... which you were.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me and repeated, “Frail old creature,” and faintly smiled, and I remembered his surprise at my physical appearance when I’d first come into this room. Jason, I supposed, had seen only my back view and mostly at a distance. I certainly hadn’t noticed anyone lurking, but I probably wouldn’t at the time have noticed half a ship’s company standing at attention. Being with the dying, seeing the death, had made ordinary life seem unreal and unimportant, and it had taken me until hours after Jason’s attack to lose that feeling altogether.

“All right,” I said, “so Jason came back empty-handed. What then?”

He shrugged. “I thought I’d probably got it wrong. Grev couldn’t have meant he had the diamonds with him.” He frowned. “I thought that was what he said, though.”

I enlightened him. “Greville was on his way to Harwich to meet a diamond cutter coming from Antwerp by ferry, who was bringing your diamonds with him. Twelve teardrops and eight stars.”

“Oh.” His face cleared momentarily with pleasure but gloom soon returned. “Well, I thought it was worth looking in his office, though Jason said he never kept anything valuable there. But for diamonds... so many diamonds... it was worth a chance. Jason didn’t take much persuading. He’s a violent young bugger...”

I wondered fleetingly if that description mightn’t be positively and scatologically accurate.

“So you went up to the roof in the service lift,” I said, “and swung some sort of pendulum at the packing room window.”

He shook his head. “Jason brought grappling irons and a rope ladder and climbed down that to the window, and broke the glass with a baseball bat. Then when he was inside I threw the hooks and the ladder down into the yard, and went down in the lift to the eighth floor, and Jason let me in through the staff door. But we couldn’t get into the stockrooms because of Grev’s infernal electronic locks, or into the showroom, same reason. And that vault... I wanted to try to beat it open with the bat but Jason said the door is six inches thick.” He shrugged. “So we had to make do with papers... and we couldn’t find anything about diamonds. Jason got angry... we made quite a mess.”

“Mm.”

“And it was all a waste of time. Jason said what we really needed was something called a Wizard, but we couldn’t find that either. In the end, we simply left. I gave it up. Grev had been too careful. I got resigned to not having the diamonds unless I paid for them. Then Jason said you were hunting high and low for them, and I got interested again. Very. You can’t blame me.”

I could and did, but I didn’t want to switch off the fountain.

“And then,” he said, “like you guessed, I inveigled you into Grev’s garden, and Jason had been waiting ages there getting furious you took so long. He let his anger out on the house, he said.”

“He made a mess there too, yes.”

“Then you woke up and set the alarms off and Jason said he was getting right nervous by then and he wasn’t going to wait around for the handcuffs. So Grev had beaten us again... and he’s beaten you too, hasn’t he?” He looked at me shrewdly. “You haven’t found the diamonds either.”

I didn’t answer him. I said, “When did Jason break into Greville’s car?”

“Well... when he finally found it in Greville’s road. I’d looked for it at the hotel and round about in Ipswich, but Grev must have hired a car to drive there, because his own car won’t start.”

“When did you discover that?”

“Saturday. If the diamonds had been in it, we wouldn’t have needed to search the house.”

“He wouldn’t have left a fortune in the street,” I said.

Pross shook his head resignedly. “You’d already looked there, I suppose.”

“I had.” I considered him. “Why Ipswich?” I said.

“What?”

“Why the Orwell Hotel at Ipswich, particularly? Why did he want you to go there?”

“No idea,” he said blankly. “He didn’t say. He’d often ask me to meet him in odd places. It was usually because he’d found some heirloom or other and wanted to know if the stones would be of use to me. An ugly old tiara once, with a boring yellow diamond centerpiece filthy from neglect. I had the stone recut and set it as the crest of a rock crystal bird and hung it in a golden cage... it’s in Florida, in the sun.”

I was shaken with the pity of it. So much soaring priceless imagination and such grubby, perfidious greed.

I said, “Had he found you a stone in Ipswich?”

“No. He told me he’d asked me to come there because he didn’t want us to be interrupted. Somewhere quiet, he said. I suppose it was because he was going to Harwich.”

I nodded. I supposed so also, though it wasn’t on the most direct route which was farther south, through Colchester. But Ipswich was where Greville had chosen, by freak mischance.

I thought of all Pross had told me, and was struck by one unexplored and dreadful possibility.

“When the scaffolding fell,” I said slowly, “when you ran across the road and found Greville lethally injured... when he was lying there bleeding with the metal bar in him... did you steal his wallet?”

Pross’s little-boy face crumpled and he put his hands to cover it as if he would weep. I didn’t believe in the tears and the remorse. I couldn’t bear him any longer. I stood up to go.

“You thought he might have diamonds in his wallet,” I said bitterly. “And then, even then, when he was dying, you were ready to rob him.”

He said nothing. He in no way denied it.

I felt such anger on Greville’s behalf that I wanted suddenly to hurt and punish the man before me with a ferocity I wouldn’t have expected in myself, and I stood there trembling with the self-knowledge and the essential restraint, and felt my throat close over any more words.

Without thinking I put my left foot down to walk out and felt the pain as an irrelevance, but then after three steps used the crutches to make my way to his doorway and round the screen into the shop and through there out onto the sidewalk, and I wanted to yell and scream at the bloody injustice of Greville’s death and the wickedness of the world and call down the rage of angels.